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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the world is a net better place with no IP or copyright laws.

I do think the world is a net worse place with IP and copyright laws.

Perhaps the Chinese industrialists are rewarding the IP holders the same way video gamers do: with exposure. And after all, we’ve been informed many times: information wants to be free. And we’ve been reminded as well: if they weren’t going to pay in the first place this isn’t revenue lost.

It'll be a better place when IP and copyright laws have reasonable term limits.

There may be a net benefit from some class of patents, but that's very far from clear.

Drugs and chemical processes are the most obvious candidates. And there's some heavy empirical evidence against the later.

I would have agreed if only nobel difficult to find things were patented.

A better world wouldn't need them, but yeah, you're right.

We won’t know until we try it out.

Public ownership of capital assets has been tried, and tried, and tried... with the same results.

You can pretend to ignore the idea originally coined by Aristotle, but you can't will it into reality.

There is a huge difference between all capital assets being public, and not considering ideas to be a capital asset.

We do, tangentially. IP laws are enforce differently across the world and across timeperiods, and the differences make for wonderful experiments.

Think of pop music expansion in the Napster era as an example.

Yet successful pop artists are drowning in money.

I have really hard time having sympathy with massively multi-millionaires like Metallica bashing people ripping their stuff.

Even in countries with stronger IP, unknown artists are struggling. So restrictions are hardly an efficient solution

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